


With Lips as Red As Blood

by JoAsakura



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Blood and Gore, M/M, berserker!dean, i guess, maybe a touch of dieselpunk if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 06:17:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17699201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/pseuds/JoAsakura
Summary: for ltleflrtDean accepts the Berserker’s Curse and becomes The Sword. Castiel is his Shield."





	With Lips as Red As Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ltleflrt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ltleflrt/gifts).



**1**

_Then_ :

Curses and blessings can be bought and sold and earned and otherwise foisted upon the unwary and the foolish. The worst are the ones born though, baked in blood and bone.

You can't destroy them of course. Matter and energy, converted from one state to another. It has to go _somewhere_.  The Men of Letters and their whispering books come when they run too deep for normal means, pull them out like a fat tumour and in turn feed it to someone stupid and desperate for power. There is protocol, after all.

But Dean Winchester is a man with little tolerance for protocol and procedure. And his mother's family is old. Ancient enough to have the cursed blood of ancient killers pumping through their veins. The berserkers, the first murderers, the blood dancers. Sometimes he sees his mother bite her lip and lick away the blood with a tremble in her shoulders and a fire behind her eyes. The urge to go to war, to slaughter the enemy, she sang the curse like a blessing in her youth, killing monsters. But Mary Campbell put down her weapons for John, for her children, wrapped herself up in charms to ensure the boys were more John's blood then hers.

The curse misses Dean by a mile, but it settles in Sam- hiding underneath his clever eyes and his kind smile until one day, Dean sees the fire red behind his brother's eyes. Their mother is dead and their father is broken and when Sam realises his predicament, he finds himself afraid, worried he's not like their mother, not strong enough, to live without drowning himself in blood. So there are arrangements to be made, John's father was one of the men with the whispering books after all, and John's come home to them in the end. He'll come and take the curse and put it in someone who wants it. Someone who _wants_ to be a killer.

But the Men are not kind, Dean's seen that with others. They pull up in their dark cars with their dark suits and dark cases, and when they leave, they take more than the curse with them. He's watched his father strip the light out of a cursed woman's eyes and leave a vaguely smiling shell behind. It's not a cure, it's a lobotomy, he thinks.

No, Dean Winchester, who has tended the Campbell lands in their father's absence, and sworn to protect his brother even from their father if necessary, does what he thinks any sane and rational sibling should do.

He punches Sam in the face and drags him out into the cornfield, and leaves him tied to the old oak tree.

~~~

 _Now_ :

Very carefully, Castiel leads Dean to the water's edge.

It's so quiet, it's almost painful. The river splashes and burbles and the wind rattles through the dead leaves still clinging from the trees. And the only other sound is Dean's breathing. Harsh and loud, breath steaming in the cold like a draft horse pushed too hard.

He's covered in blood.

Mostly, _mostly_ , it's not his. The gobbets of flesh in his sandy hair and the crimson trickles streaking down his face to soak into his ratty coat smell like garbage and old lilies. Vampire blood. When the curse is burning in him, iron and steel turn away like smoke- even the big old limousine one had rammed into Dean had parted and shattered.

But the enemy learns. Bullets made from witches' bones, knives quenched in the spittle of a leviathan, those dig in, even if Dean can't feel it.

He stops just past the shore, where the water is at their thighs, half-afraid if they go deeper into the stream Dean might drown. The curse is no proof against drowning, after all.

Castiel should know. He's the one who put it in him.

 

 

**2**

_Then_ :

In the cornfield, red poppies nodding in the evening breeze, Dean takes a page from one of his father's books, makes the appropriate sacrifices to the Absent God in Light and the Absent Goddess in Darkness and leaves Sam some snacks and bottled water before he drinks down the mead that will kill him just enough to go into the grey Purgatory between worlds, and find something to eat the curse.

And for nine days and nine nights he wanders in a twilight version of the cornfield, watching things whisper between the stalks, until he sees it, lurking behind an echo of the barn. Too many eyes and too many wings and it doesn't look like anything his brain wants to recognise and Dean almost grins, even as the shiver crawls through ever cell in his body.

He's found an angel.

~~~

_Now:_

Sam and Charlie, Rowena and that toad Crowley are waiting for them, but Castiel doesn't hurry, carefully stripping Dean out of his bloody clothes and tossing them on the bank. The blood flows like petals and red silk into the slow-moving water as it moves around them, and Dean's chest heaves even as he lets Castiel slide gore soaked jeans down his legs.

Dean Winchester is solid, a spattering of freckles and a collection of magical tattoos scattered across his bare skin. The burn in the shape of a hand has faded to pale and twisted flesh on his shoulder, and Castiel gently sluices water over it first from cupped hands.

Humanity's kings and presidents call them angels and demons and monsters and Castiel finds the division unnecessarily complex. There is as much _functional_ difference between him and that war-profiteering sleazebag crouching at the crossroads, wheedling bargains from desperate lovers and heartbroken parents as there was between Dean and his brother.  Just as there is no difference between a curse and blessing, he thinks. It's simply a matter of perception.

Humanity's prophets call the current situation a war between good and evil, and Castiel finds _that_ description absurdly reductionist. It is, more appropriately he thinks as he cups more water in his hands, a war fought on multiple fronts between unthinkable forces, and regardless of who wins- Lucifer or Michael above, or the Leviathan scrabbling at the dark gates under the world- humanity loses.

 

**3**

_Then_ :

The thing with too many eyes and far too many wings is obviously confused by Dean's request as it follows him out of the twilight into the daylit cornfield where Sam is eating a packaged hand pie.

The books, it turns out, are deeply, profoundly _wrong_. There is _no_ creature in the twilight lands that can eat a curse or a blessing, the thing explains in a voice like a thousand starlings screaming overhead. It has to go _somewhere_ , after all. It takes Sam several minutes to remember to swallow. He'd gotten himself free eight and a half days ago but he'd stayed, half out of worry for his brother and half with the hope that he could give Dean the mother of all talking to's if he lived.

Sam Winchester never predicted the possibility that his brother would come out of the twilight with... with.

 _That_.

So, faced with the reality of the situation, Dean does what any sane and rational sibling would do and tells the thing to give the curse to him. And before Sam can voice a no, the thing reaches down and pulls the curse from his veins. Not like a throbbing tumour, tendrils digging into the host, but gently, like a plant, gently readied for a new container.

The thing with too many eyes doesn't understand why Dean would do this. Human lives are short, ending in decrepitude and death. What does it matter which one kills more than another? But the bargain is made and sealed and the angel is a thing of honour. And so it cautiously takes the curse and does as it's asked.

But when it places it inside of Dean, the young man screams and the place where one incomprehensible hand brushes him curdles and burns.

When it's over, though, Sam is beside him, still himself and despite the fire screaming in his veins, Dean can only smile.

~~~

 _Now_ :

When the fire finally goes out behind Dean's eyes, and his breath stills, he leans his cheek against Castiel's hand, blood trickling between the other's fingers. "How many?" he croaks.

 

**4**

_Then_ :

Sam ends up with the Men after all, buried in books and scrolls because somewhere there is a way to close the gates of heaven and hell and everything in between and maybe, just maybe, curses and blessings and charms and spells will become a thing of a superstitious past. Maybe, he can find a way to break the laws of physics and destroy the curse that should  have been his, burning inside of his brother. Dean becomes a hunter- it's what one does after all. A single berserker will tear through a nest of nightmares faster than a hundred fragile normals, even armed with charms and spells. But the collateral damage, the probability that the living weapon will turn on it's handlers, has been a concern since the eldritch wars started to spill over into the world.

So he stands in a bunker, dressed in plain black sweatpants and a t-shirt with fifty other men and women, waiting for his other half.

If the berserkers are the sword, the blessed are the shield. And somewhere, in the men and women being led in in white, his shield is waiting.

When he meets Castiel, with eyes blue as heaven itself, the burn on his arm aches and it sends a shiver right through his entire body.

He feels like he's met an angel.

~~~

 _Then_ :

The thing with too many eyes slides into the rustling depths of the cornfield, freed from twilight by a young man's bargain, but stops before it gets too far.

Dean Winchester is different from the other humans he'd seen enter Purgatory. His eyes like fierce green glass knives bright even in that dull place. Love and hope and anger burn in him like a star and the thing... Castiel, the angel... decides it needs to see more.

And so, in the shape of a shadow, it steals a spell from John Winchester's book and it finds the body of a man newly dead. In hands never meant to hold a human pen it writes the thousand names of the Absent God and the Absent Goddess on blue silk and wraps the body three times with it. And when the way opens, it folds it's unnatural geometry into the shape of flesh and bone.

And Castiel, the _man_ , opens his eyes for the first time.

 

**5**

_Now_ :

Castiel doesn't bother to clean the blood from Dean's face before he kisses him. "Twelve vampires working for the Leviathan. But one of them tried to run  you over with a Cadillac. It was... different, especially when you beheaded one with the windshield wiper blades," he says, hoping he sounds like he's teasing and enjoying the feel of Dean's stubbled jaw softening under his touch. "But we retrieved the Lance. Sam and Rowena are studying it now. Charlie is following the radio transmissions of the Men. We got out just in time."

Everyone wants them dead it seems these days. The  Men of Letters, the Followers of Leviathan, Michael's "Angels" and Lucifer's "Demons".  Their allies are few and far between. A vampire here, a pair of witch twins there. A prophet and his mother.  Some of them more unlikely than others, but they all want the same thing. For a day to dawn without a war of monsters.

"Twelve. Well, _that's_ just disappointing," Dean sags against him, wet hands raking through Castiel's dark hair. "I'm not getting old, am I?"

"You're getting older every day, each moment closer to cellular destruction," Castiel's shrugs, letting one hand trail down Dean's chest. "But I'll protect you every day until you drop dead and decrepit on the ground."

"Oh, baby," Dean rubs against him as the wind picks up. "Such a sweet talker. What did I do to get a shield like you?"

"You got cursed," Castiel offers blandly, feeling Dean's cock twitch under his touch and tasting the blood in their shared kiss. The others are just over the hill.

"I guess that's a matter of perception, isn't it?"

 

 


End file.
